“This is what Robert Mugabe has done to us, turned us into a nation of peddlers and beggars,” she said flatly, allowing her thoughts to then wander off into the future. “If he remains, we will just die.”
Misery in Zimbabwe continues. An election is coming this month and there is some hope that Mugabe might be voted out of office, but it seems unlikely that Mubage will allow himself to lose the election. He has banned Westerners from observing the election. The New York Times reports:
In past elections, youth brigades were set loose on political opponents, and such patterns of intimidation continue. Two weeks ago, nine members of the Progressive Teachers Union — perceived to support Mr. Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change — said they were dragooned from the streets and beaten with lead pipes in a ZANU-PF building.
“Only an idiot would believe Mugabe won’t win the election, and by ‘win’ I mean ‘steal,’ ” said Raymond Majongwe, the union’s secretary general, still nursing a bruise above his left eye that he said was inflicted with a Coke bottle.
Mr. Makoni began campaigning only in late February, delayed by mysterious logistical hitches: the company contracted to print his fliers oddly out of paper, the drivers he had hired unable to find gas. These problems could have been caused by gremlins at the behest of Mr. Mugabe — or simply have been forlorn facts of life in a capsized economy.
There is nothing inherent about Africa that requires poverty. You can lay the current economic ruin in Zimbabwe squarely at the feet of the autocratic Mugabe government, which has destroyed the economy with racist policies of seizing white-owned farms, created hyperinflation by putting too much money in circulation, and attempted to override the laws of supply and demand, an attempt that was doomed to fail from the start.
More from the New York Times:
Before Zimbabwe was an economic basket case it was a regional breadbasket. But in 2000, the Mugabe government began seizing white-owned commercial farms, and while that might have struck a blow against the country’s colonial past, it also sent the economy into free fall.
. . . . That suffering is hard to miss. Nearly half the nation is malnourished, according to the World Food Program. Major hospitals have stopped doing surgery for lack of anesthesia. Inflation makes a fool’s game of hard work and frugality.
On Jan. 18, Zimbabwe’s reserve bank put a $10 million bill into general circulation, a maroon-tinged piece of paper with a sketch of water gushing through a dam that might well have symbolized the escaping value of the note itself. Worth enough at the time to buy a chicken, it now will barely buy a few eggs, with a value of about 40 cents.
Zimbabwe’s inflation is officially computed with a dizzying accumulation of zeros that offers little clue to the distress it inflicts. John Robertson, an economist, said the new note was losing value at 70 Zimbabwean dollars a minute. Cash earned must quickly be converted into cash spent; only marketable goods and foreign money hold their value.
. . . . Some 3 million of Zimbabwe’s population of 13 million have left the country, and the money and merchandise they send home provide the only stability against the country’s vertiginous breakdown.
Mr. Murefu buys that remitted foreign cash with the Zimbabwean dollars he collects from two sources: merchants who by law must sell their goods in local currency and the flailing government itself, which is disastrously printing oodles of new money to pay its own debts.
Ms. Sithole, the former bookkeeper, does not exactly understand what has befallen her country. She knows only that 90 percent of the jobs are gone, that everyone’s savings have been swallowed by inflation, that each house has its own story of personal apocalypse.
Forget genocide. Mugabe is in the process of killing his own people through economic ignorance, stubbornness and racism. He needs to go.
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